CEO and co-founder of Filebase, Joshua Noble, told attendees at a virtual IT press tour about items on the Filebase roadmap.
We first learnt about Filebase in April last year, with its ability to store S3-compliant objects on back end decentralised storage networks such as SIA, Storj and Skynet. These are blockchain-based, but Filebase abstracts that away – using API-based front ends – and hides associated crypto-currency billing behind dollars and cents pricing for customers.
Boston-based Noble told attendees “We started building the technology for this around 2017. We founded the company in early 2019. And we launched the products or service offering in May of 2019. Since then, we have acquired a little over 8,000 registered users on the platform.”
He said “On any given day, we’re processing … tens of millions of API calls per day. And we’re actually about to hit one billion objects processed in total. … That means we’ve stored a total of are about to have stored a total of one billion objects on two different decentralised storage networks in totality.” That would be the SIA and Storj networks.
The roadmap items are:
- Additional back end networks throughout 2022 – IPFS, Filecoin and Arweave;
- Back end network selection to optimise performance, cost, etc.;
- Geo-fencing;
- Object-copying between networks with multiple erasure-coded replicas across networks;
- Add CDN (Content Distribution Network) use case – “We want to launch and offer CDN feature sets … more custom setting of cache control headers, and things like that.”
- Support for custom domains so that “you can have a fully static website powered by Firebase and the decentralised networks that we’re built on top of.”
- S3 Object Lock – “This is a big one, of course, in the ransomware world of being able to have a objects in the bucket locked for a certain duration of time”;
- Offline mode so you can access your data without going through the Filebase platform.
What about archiving capability? “We don’t have a formal roadmap item for it at the moment but it’s absolutely something that we are exploring.”
Noble said “IPFS is heavily used in the crypto blockchain NFC worlds. IPFS is a data transmission protocol. … We have figured out a way to pin data onto the IPFS network, make it accessible, but have it be backed by these decentralised storage networks and have the whole thing decentralised so you can access data. Filebase, heaven forbid, can go down entirely, [and] all the data is still accessible.”
He is keen on Filecoin too. “[The] Filecoin network has about 13 to 14 exabytes of capacity, the last time I checked. And so this will be a huge boost for us in terms of capacity that we can offer to our customers.” It also has large sector sizes (write blocks) but Filebase’s packing technology can fill those sectors up.
Geo-fencing is “basically placing data within a specific geographic region for compliance and regulatory purposes, things of that nature.”
Filebase is a small startup, literally, in headcount terms. It has about a dozen employees and they all work remotely; it’s distributed, just like its file storage architecture.
